High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam Cast and Character Guide

High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam has the machinery of a military thriller, but its most important scenes are built around people talking, arguing and trying to understand what the intelligence in front of them actually means. Inspired by former CIA analyst John Nixon’s memoir “Debriefing the President,” TNT’s eight-episode limited series begins during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and follows the long search for Saddam Hussein before turning toward Nixon’s interrogation of the captured Iraqi leader. Joel Kinnaman and Waleed Zuaiter anchor that confrontation, while Dar Salim, Lena Góra, Rebecca Night and several familiar television actors populate the intelligence and military operations around them. The cast mixes portrayals of clearly identifiable historical figures with characters created or reshaped for the drama, which makes knowing who is playing whom particularly useful here.

Related: Where Is John Nixon Now? The Real CIA Analyst Behind High Value Target

Joel Kinnaman as John Nixon

Joel Kinnaman plays John Nixon, the CIA analyst whose real experiences provide the foundation for “High Value Target.” Nixon specializes in Saddam Hussein and becomes increasingly frustrated with the gap between what analysts know about Iraq and what senior officials want from them. Once he reaches Baghdad, his knowledge of Saddam puts him in a position few intelligence officers could occupy, eventually making him one of the first Americans to question the former Iraqi president directly after his capture. The real Nixon later wrote the memoir on which the series is based and serves as an executive producer on the adaptation.

Kinnaman brings considerable political-thriller experience to the part, although viewers may recognize him from very different projects. He played Ed Baldwin in For All Mankind, Takeshi Kovacs in the first season of Altered Carbon, Rick Flag in the Suicide Squad films and Alex Murphy in the 2014 RoboCop. High Value Target gives him a less physically imposing character than many of those roles, relying instead on Nixon’s persistence and his tendency to challenge the people above him.

Waleed Zuaiter as Saddam Hussein

Waleed Zuaiter portrays Saddam Hussein after spending much of the early story as the man everyone else is trying to find. Once Saddam and Nixon finally share a room, the series changes shape, moving away from the mechanics of the manhunt and toward the strange relationship between an analyst and a dictator he had studied for years without ever meeting. The drama is particularly interested in the difference between the Saddam imagined by American intelligence and the person Nixon believed he encountered during their conversations.

Zuaiter has previously appeared in politically charged dramas including Baghdad Central, The Spy and Oslo, and more recently played Howard in The Girlfriend. His casting is especially effective because the role requires more than reproducing Saddam’s recognizable appearance. The interrogation scenes depend on Zuaiter making him persuasive, evasive and difficult to read without softening what Saddam represented historically.

Dar Salim as Captain Samir

Dar Salim plays Captain Samir, one of the most immediately important characters alongside Nixon during the Baghdad storyline. Samir searches for Saddam on the ground in the premiere and is later assigned to Nixon as his translator when the analyst arrives in Iraq. Their partnership puts Samir between American intelligence officers and an Iraqi society he understands far better than they do, giving the series a perspective that Nixon cannot provide on his own. TNT’s Episode 1 and Episode 2 descriptions specifically identify Samir as a major part of the hunt.

Salim will be familiar to many viewers as Ahmed in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. He also appeared in Game of Thrones and played Mohammed Farooq in The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Born in Baghdad before later building his career in Denmark, Salim is one of the more distinctive casting choices in the ensemble.

Lena Góra as Polly Stevens

Lena Góra plays Polly Stevens, a CIA colleague who operates within the intelligence side of Nixon’s story. Unlike Nixon and Saddam, Polly is not presented as one of the immediately recognizable historical names behind the Iraq War, and the drama uses characters around Nixon to represent the institutional pressures and disagreements inside the intelligence community. She becomes part of the professional world Nixon repeatedly pushes against as his confidence in his own reading of Saddam grows.

Góra is a Polish actress, writer and producer whose recent work includes “The Eastern Gate,” “Erupcja,” “Imago” and “Roving Woman.” She has frequently worked in European independent cinema, making “High Value Target” one of her more prominent English-language television roles.

Rebecca Night and Tom Berenger play Nixon’s family

Rebecca Night plays Rebecca Nixon, John’s wife, while Tom Berenger portrays his father, Charles. The family scenes give the series somewhere to place Nixon outside the CIA, although both relationships remain tied closely to the professional obsession driving him toward Iraq. Charles is depicted as a veteran who questions his son’s desk-bound intelligence career, while Rebecca deals with the consequences of John’s work from home.

Night has appeared in Professor T, The Sandman and Midsomer Murders. Berenger needs considerably less introduction, having built a long career that includes Platoon, The Big Chill, Major League and the Sniper franchise. His presence gives the smaller family storyline some additional weight even when the main plot remains firmly in Iraq.

Talia Balsam and Christopher McDonald join the CIA storyline

Talia Balsam plays Angela Jenkins, one of Nixon’s superiors, while Christopher McDonald appears as Alexander Van Dusen. Jenkins is particularly important as a representative of the bureaucracy Nixon continually challenges, placing his arguments about Saddam and Iraq against the priorities of the agency around him. The wider intelligence ensemble also includes Ewan Miller as Jerry Munro, while Matt Barr plays Major Cal Atkins on the military side of the story.

Balsam is known for Mad Men, Divorce and Wilderness, while McDonald’s career ranges from Thelma & Louise to Hacks and his enduring role as Shooter McGavin in the Happy Gilmore films. Barr has appeared in Walker, Blood & Treasure and Hatfields & McCoys. The casting gives even the institutional side of the series a number of recognizable faces without taking attention away from Kinnaman and Zuaiter’s central confrontation.

Which High Value Target characters are real?

John Nixon and Saddam Hussein are unquestionably real people, while the series also depicts historical political figures including President George W. Bush, played by Paul Ryan, and Condoleezza Rice, played by Danielle Lewis. Nixon’s role as a CIA analyst and his interrogation of Saddam are drawn directly from his memoir, although the television series dramatizes and compresses parts of the wider story.

The supporting cast requires more caution. Captain Samir has strong similarities to real Iraqi-American translator Samir Al Jassim, who participated in the hunt for Saddam, but the production has not publicly established Dar Salim’s character as a scene-for-scene portrayal of him. Other CIA and military characters should likewise not automatically be assumed to correspond to a single real person simply because the larger events are historical. “High Value Target” works as a dramatization of Nixon’s experience, not as a roster in which every fictional name can be matched neatly to someone in the historical record.